Oppo Foldable Phone Prototype Is Quite Similar To Huawei Mate X

With multiple manufacturers showing off foldable smartphones at the Mobile World Congress 2019 in Barcelona, Oppo isn’t going to sit back and let its competitors hog the limelight. The company has shown off a prototype of its foldable smartphone today and if you’ve been following the news for a past couple of days, you’ll instantly see that it looks quite a lot like the Huawei Mate X which also happens to be a foldable smartphone.

The Oppo foldable phone prototype folds out much like the Mate X but you could chalk that up as a coincidence because so does the Royole FlexPai. However, the hinge design is very similar to the Mate X and even the camera strip at the back when the device is folded.

We found the hinge on Huawei Mate X to have a solid design with ample rigidity against sheering forces. Oppo may have drawn inspiration from that for the hinge on its foldable phone.

Oppo hasn’t handed off the device to the press yet. The company VP Brian Shen posted some images of the device on Weibo and said that Oppo has developed it in-house even though some might suggest that it’s based on a reference design from an OEM. He also said that the company initially planned on unveiling the device at Oppo’s MWC keynote but decided against it has it “wouldn’t have been meaningful” to unveil it at the conference.

The mass production of this phone is apparently not a done deal as yet. Shen said that he doesn’t think the foldable form factor provides much value to the user experience aside from the fact that it lets users enlarge the display and fold it occasionally. Nevertheless, he said that depending on the number of retweets his post gets, his team could consider mass producing the device.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: MWC, MWC 2019, Oppo